Why «brine»?

Many people express their raised-eyebrows misunderstanding and even outright opposition to the name «Brine Angels». Especially in Russian. It brings up negative associations. Pickles as the vodka chaser. The salty solution of the pickles as the hang-over remedy the morning after. The red-neck bumpkin low class way of life. Ah, all those associations.

First off, all our associations are made of ourselves. For some all women are naked under their clothes. Huh? Do jars of pickles on store shelves necessarily suggest an alcoholic binge for you? Three men are building a church, one is making money, the other is toiling at the hateful slavish work, the third one is building a temple to praise God. Blind men feeling up an elephant. You know the metaphors.

At any rate learning a foreign language is your intimate thing, there are only two players there — the language and you. If you are trying to bring in other players, like cool schools, pretty names, opinions of others, pleasing associations and mimicking the ways of others, you are risking to lose the true essence of owning a language. Because you can’t possibly own anything pretending to be somebody else. Learn a language as yourself. Do not associate with any names. Including our name. Taking it a bit further: disassociate from any names. Perhaps one of the ideas behind Brine Angels is to underline this idea. The other is that it is simply funny. And reflects the process of learning like nothing else. All other interpretations are just add-ons of wandering minds.

Would you rather prefer to accept a gold nugget from dirty hands of an old vagabond monk or a prettily wrapped plastic replica of the same nugget from perfumed hands of a drop-dead-gorgeous movie actress? Given you will never ever see either person again? Many choose the latter. But stopping to think for a moment may help to reconsider. To first reconsider the choice, and then who those givers really are. Those postmen. The delivery men. The messengers. The angels.

Why allow yourself to actually learn stuff only after you find a school generally accepted as cool, a «working for others» methodology, a flashy textbook, a pretty teacher? Learn a language because you can go about your own life using it as yourself.

No associations with the most prestigious or pretty-sounding language school will ever compare to actually speaking a foreign language like a native — the path you’ve reached it notwithstanding!

I don’t mean go for ugly names and ditch pretty names. I mean, look at the root of the matter.